And then on cue came the meat of the speech: Demonizing immigrants. When he declared, “Struggling communities, especially immigrant communities, will also be helped by immigration policies that focus on the best interests of American workers and American families,” he would have us believe he had not eradicated DACA, had not doubled the deportation of noncriminal illegal immigrants and not understood a single economic study finding immigrants contribute to our society by starting more businesses, committing fewer crimes and owning more homes (by percentage) than the native-born population. He utterly rejects the notion that America is the land of immigrants — the place made prosperous and dynamic by those who come here from elsewhere. --- Jennifer Rubin, Trump’s State of the Union: A diatribe against immigrants, the Washington Post, January 30, 2018.

I didn't watch the Address. There's nothing in that. I generally haven't watched the State of the Union Addresses in the past. Not even when Obama was President. They're boring. They're meant to be boring. Judging by the accounts I've read, this one was even more boring than is typical. Snap polls showed the folks at home liked it. I think they liked it because it was boring. It came as a relief. The Democrats there were determined to be impressively unimpressed but Jennifer Rubin's assessment is that even Republicans were unenthusiastic. Trump stuck to the script but as Rubin says, “An on-message Trump is a dull Trump.”

I wouldn't be surprised if he even bored himself. He doesn't seem to enjoy the aspects of the job that require work and don't reward him immediately with raucous applause from his base of loud, angry white guys clamoring for vindication for their anger. He was reading a lot of other people's words containing feelings he generally shared but expressed in less than fun and funny (to him) ways and in service to ideas and policies he didn't fully understand or understand half way or understand at all because understanding them would require thought and study, work he doesn't feel he needs to do because he’s a genius and because that sort of work, thinking as work, mastering details, memorizing names and numbers, is what he pays flunkies like Stephen Miller to do. That he had to deliver the speech at all---and you have to wonder if he knows he has to, that the Constitution requires whoever’s President to “give to the Congress [from time to time] Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient” and tradition dictates that the President does it in person---probably irked him. It took time away from whatever not work he'd rather be doing to while away the evening.

But it put him alone at center stage. He had the spotlight all to himself. People treated him like he thinks a President who isn't named Obama or Clinton should be treated, with fawning, gushing respect! (As in "I demand respect, dammit!") He showed up. He went through the proper motions. And he threw in things that livened the proceedings for himself---that is he boasted and bragged and flattered himself whenever he could. Nobody admires Trump like Trump admires Trump. When I read in Rubin’s account of the address that he applauded for himself, I assumed she was being figurative. His obvious self-satisfaction and habitual self-congratulation amounts to self-applause. But it turns out that at points it did look like he was actually clapping for himself.

I wouldn't put it past him, but I'm not sure. In a number of the pictures I've seen it looks more like he's applauding his guests in the gallery, which is the right thing to do. That’s why every President invites the guests they do to the State of the Union. They're there to be applauded because they've done things for which they deserve to be applauded. This President just can't help looking cheesy and phony whenever he's trying to express any heartfelt emotion that isn't anger, self-pity, vindictiveness, or hate, the emotions that he most feels most intensely and honestly at heart. In other photos it looks like he was leading the audience in applause for what was supposed to be good and exciting news and coming across like a smug and self-satisfied toastmaster at a Kiwanis Club awards banquet giving shout-outs to the hard work of the decorations committee and the ladies in the kitchen who slaved over the delicious dinner and went all out on the dessert. I wouldn't know, and the fact is, he does like to hog credit and he expects people to be as impressed with him as he is with himself. Actually clapping for himself might be reflexive. But whether he did or didn't put his hands together for the great President Donald Trump, he enjoyed the moments best when the subject of celebration was President and the applause was, or could be taken to be, for himself.

The AIDS-infected, hut dwelling you know whos from shithole countries.

He euphemized. He talked in code. To the likely disappointment of his base, he had to use language that was politically correct. But I’m sure they made allowances. They knew what he meant.

He’s going to throw them all out!

He won’t let any more in.

America will be great again because it will be wiped clean of THEM!

The address received good grades from the usual suspects. His right wing apologists and republican shills in the media and online. Trepidatious political journalists trolling for more access or desperate for him to turn into a normal president so they don’t have to work so hard and can attend parties with their Republican friends again. Jake Tapper damned it with faint praise as containing some “beautiful prose.” Even so, he was reaching. I’ve read the transcript and couldn’t find any beautiful prose myself. Timothy Egan, of the failing New York Times, wrote that there were “some uplifting words during the State of the Union address, words with all the staying power of vapor from a sewage vent.”

But there is some good prose. Prose that is solidly grammatical, not original or inspired but mostly devoid of clichés. Prose that’s not beautiful, lyrical, sonorous, or cadenced but that’s more than workmanlike. Prose that’s direct, specific, and clear if not explicit in its meaning. That would be found in the paragraphs in which he lays into immigrants as the gravest threat to white America’s liberty, safety, and economic security and promises to put a stop to it by throwing out the undesirables and not letting any more in.

And that’s what he wants, and apparently all he wants, to do as President. To go down in history as the President who threw them all out. It’s sort of as if all Andrew Jackson wanted to be remembered for was what he did to the Cherokee, as if all Rutherford B. Hayes wanted to be remembered for was ending Reconstruction (which is all he is remembered for, but I doubt he’d be happy about that), as if all Woodrow Wilson wanted to be remembered for was resegregating the federal government, as if all FDR wanted to be remembered for was the interments, as if all Nixon wanted to be remembered for was the Southern Strategy, and as if all George W. Bush wants to be remembered for is having let New Orleans drown.

Sort of?

As if?

Sort of, because all the others, even George W. Bush (although maybe not Hayes), had real, positive, substantial achievements they’d naturally prefer to be remembered for and Trump so far has had none and isn’t likely to have any before he’s driven from office or defeated for re-election or descends completely into driveling madness and is allowed to wander the White House all day and all night in his bathrobe calling for Diet Cokes and searching for his cell phone which Melania has finally hidden in her purse while Mike Pence, John Kelly, and Jim Mattis, with the permission and cooperation of Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, run the country, which they may pretty much already do.

And as if because as far Trump knows or cares about history that’s all they are remembered for and that’s fine with him. He’d be happy to be in their company if that was the case. If he was aware that was the case. But Trump has no sense of history. He gives no thought to it. The past is meaningless to him except as he can use it to boast about himself. The future doesn’t exist except, again, as far as he can see himself aggrandized in it. He lives in the moment and at the moment the thing he wants to do is the thing he knows he can do, not just because he has the power, not just because his base is cheering him on and the Republicans in Congress running for re-election know they need the base to turn out for them and are afraid to offend them by getting in their hero-king’s way, but because he’s doing what Republicans want.

He is a Republican president, when all is said and done. The first wholly Republican one. And the Republican Party is the anti-immigrant party. It’s the anti-everybody who isn’t US party.

Oh, sure, they call him a Republican. They can’t avoid it. But they usually use the word neutrally, as a simple identifier, like the R before the abbreviation for their state inside the parentheses after a Congressman or Senator’s name. Or they use the word in conjunction with modifiers like “unconventional,” only calling him a Republican on their way to saying he’s not like other Republicans, which sometimes they mean as praise for him and sometimes mean as an apology for other Republicans---they’re not like him, thank God!

Except that he is like them and they are like him. In substance and in essence, they all want them same things. What the media is doing is avoiding telling the truth about Republicans and what the Republican Party stands for. Us versus Them.

In attacking immigrants and moving to throw as many out of the country as, like I said, ICE can grab, he’s doing what most Republicans want, the Republicans in Congress and the voters who put them there. Steve King not Lindsey Graham is the representative Republican here, and King didn’t win re-election in a squeaker.

“Keep our taxes low. Keep THEM out---out of our schools. Out of our neighborhoods. Out of our states. Out of our sight!”

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The thing about that Immigrant Carnage that surprised me a little was how openly fascist it was: http://firedirectioncenter.blogspot.com/2018/01/amerika-erwache.html

"...the part about how the herrnvolk are endangered by a hidden swarm of dusky, violent untermenschen - and nefarious Auslandische foreign powers - and that only the Leader, and the Party - and only by their being hard, hard as Krupp steel (but fair! Fair, mind you, so long as you're not one of the dusky traitors within!) - can save us from their evil...the stuff about America Awake! to the danger of The Eternal Immigrant was such a pure, uncut Steven Miller hommage to the Fuhrer, vintage Adolf whine in a new orange bottle, that I wonder how many people missed that."

I've resisted the "Trump is Hitler" meme because I don't think it's true. And I don't think that the GOP is the new Nazi Party. But when you bring in the whole immigrant thing, boyhowdy, do they get bugnuts like a Hitlerjugend being told a race traitor is somewhere nearby.

Very well said. I have to admit I agreed with almost all of your observations, as extreme (by the usual standards) as they are. And it hurts me to think of the president of the U. S. in these terms. But I think you're right. Thank you.